


Not in Blood but in Bond

by ArwenKenobi



Series: Not in Blood but in Bond 'verse [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-03
Updated: 2012-07-03
Packaged: 2017-11-09 01:51:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/449936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArwenKenobi/pseuds/ArwenKenobi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karen started to see Sherlock as family.  When she voiced it aloud Tess told her she really had no idea if she counted Sherlock as part of theirs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not in Blood but in Bond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tocourtdisaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tocourtdisaster/gifts).



Karen Lestrade has always been pleased with her life. People are often surprised when she tells them that and it really drives her mad. It irritates her to no end that people seem to think that she’s disadvantaged because she grew up without a mother. People treat her the same way they treat someone who was born without the use of their legs or their eyes. She tries to explain to them that she finds it very difficult to miss or want for something that she has no context for. Karen has often suggested to these people that they could ask her older sisters about their opinions on growing up motherless. Louise had been five and Tess had been three when their mother had left while Karen had only been five months old. She leaves giggling to herself when people seriously take her up on that suggesting. Tess doesn’t remember their mother at all and Louise is more than a little angry at her. Always will be, Karen reckons.

Mostly the implication that she is somehow disabled angers her because that implies that her father is inadequate. Her father was Gregory Lestrade of Scotland Yard and she would never replace him for the world. She would never wish him away for a mother, her birth mother or some other woman, and she never has resented not having a step mother. The closest female influence she has in her life, aside from her sisters, is her Aunt Molly who lives up in Upper Clapton and she is just fine with that. Molly Hemworth-Lestrade is not her mother but she’s as good as for those little things that her sisters cannot answer and that her father, being a man after all, either cannot deal with or refuses to.

Louise and Tess have their own spheres of interest – they are in university after all. One day Louise will be a teacher and one day Tess will be an actress. She has a blind faith when it comes to Tess and she knows it but she hasn’t seen a performance to match Tess’s musical turn as Velma Kelly in her uni’s production of Chicago. Karen has decided she wants to be like her father. She’s wanted to be a police officer since she was old enough to understand what her father does and she was encouraged in that dream every time Sally Donovan came by the house. Dad worried about her and her career choice, and of course he would; he is her father after all and she is still young. 

Dad understandably has built his world around two things – his job and his daughters. Surprisingly that mixes quite well. It all works out well in the end and Karen knows she has to thank Louise for that working out so well. Karen knows that if she was the oldest and Louise the youngest they would be looking at some very different family dynamics. That being said someone has to watch out for their father and that has been Karen’s role since she could ask her father if he was alright of if he wanted to play a game with her. 

This wasn’t to say that her sisters did not watch out for their father. Louise, as mentioned, was much more concerned with running the house and minding her siblings and Tess seldom saw a world outside of herself at the best of times. Being their father’s keeper had simply come naturally to Karen and it had all become truly official once Sherlock Holmes walked into their lives. 

===================================================================================== 

Karen had been eleven when her father had come home upset over a bloke called Sherlock Holmes. At first he was a problem because he was a drug addicted genius who Dad just couldn’t shake loose from his cases because he solved almost all of them. Dad was brilliant, Dad was so brilliant and she made a point to tell him so every day. Louise had told her to stop eventually because she thought that it wasn’t helping. Karen had ignored it and continued praising her father. He wouldn’t let her look at the cases, naturally, but she knew what drug addiction was and knew that Sherlock Holmes would be nothing without her father. Now, years later, Karen knows exactly what that really meant. Sherlock Holmes would have killed himself, accidently or otherwise, without her father and his cases. He also wouldn’t have become the person who would throw himself off a building to protect his friends. The Sherlock Holmes she first met would have sold her for drugs if he had a mind to.

Sherlock Holmes was such a part of Dad’s life that Tess once asked if she should set a chair for him at dinner. She’d been sent to her room for that one – and then Karen had followed swiftly after for muttering something untoward about her. The sentiment was understandable, not Tess’s need for attention but the rest of it. They had never met Sherlock Holmes but he was a part of their life now and Karen figured even then that he always would be for good or ill. It would only be a matter of time before he’d show up, that was all. Not for a dinner invitation, Karen knew enough not to expect that the way she did not expect Tess to ever say please or thank you for anything except when she wanted a favour of some sort, but somehow.

One day Karen came home from school and found Sherlock riffling through her father’s desk. She didn’t know what he was looking for and she didn’t care. In retrospect she should have thought a bit more about what she was doing since she walked in front of the doorway in full view of the skinny, pale, ghost of a man that her father truly believed could be a good person despite all evidence to the contrary. She’d texted her father from her sister’s phone – Tess had left it behind to charge – at the same time as she’d dialed 999 to report a break in.

Sherlock had wandered in while she was still on the phone with the dispatcher and Karen remembered her heart pounding against her ribs. She was small and he was big but, judging by how out of it he looked, she gathered she could out run him or dash behind him or get away between his legs or something. She also could get out the window and out onto her neighbour’s roof.

“You wouldn’t make the jump” were Sherlock’s first words to her. He’d outlined to her how she’d likely miss the edge and the fall would break her leg. Her father would then kill him and despite how he acted he really did not have a death wish. “You likely would be able to get past me if you’d like to run.”

Something about the phrasing made her keep talking to Sherlock even though the man on the other end of the line told her to stop saying anything. “You’d let me escape. Isn’t that cheating?”

Sherlock had raised an eyebrow as if actually impressed with her. “You’re Karen, right?”

“And you’re Mr. Holmes.”

“My brother is Mr. Holmes,” Sherlock had harshly corrected her. He didn’t give her another name or offer that she call him Sherlock but Karen never called him Mr. Holmes again.

“Charmed.” Karen had no problem sneering at people who got in her face now but she was much older than she was then and would not have blamed Sherlock, felon or not, if he had wiped the sneer off her face right then and there. Instead of behaving like a typical criminal, because that was how Karen had seen him despite everything her father said about him, he’d scanned her from head to toe like she’d seen security guards do at the airport. Not quite the same though. It was closer to walking through a metal detector or being x-rayed. She remembered overhearing Dad and Sally talking about how he could figure anyone or anything out just by looking at them. She should have felt scared but she really should have been scared a long time ago and there was no point to starting now. Sherlock may be a criminal to her but Dad trusted him and she trusted Dad. 

“I believe so” was Sherlock’s response when he had finished looking at her. He then had asked her to tell the dispatcher that he was sitting down and had no intent to flee or intention of harming her. Karen had kept the nice man on the line because Dad had always taught her to hang up last but had talked with Sherlock for a few minutes before her father had arrived home and took the phone from her. That was after he had handcuffed Sherlock to the kitchen chair and just before he’d sent Karen to her room and told her to stay there until he came for her.

As if. She’d spied from the staircase just like her father would expect of her but tuned out most of her father’s yelling and Sherlock’s quiet acceptance and some slightly louder arguments. He seems have broken in looking for a specific type of pen and not money or valuables. Dad had not been answering his phone and he had not anticipated for Karen to be coming home when she did. He knew the older daughters had school commitments today but had forgotten about Karen.

He’d winked at her on the way out. Dad had managed to get the Met to get out and let him handle it and her father had talked to her about exactly what she and Sherlock had said to each other. “I think he likes you” had been her father’s amused response after her story. “As much as he can like a little girl, that is.”

“I’m not a little girl.”

Dad had said of course not and had ruffled her hair then. Karen remembers being annoyed at that gesture, it always had irked her and had always meant that he wasn’t taking her seriously. “He’s not as bad as I thought.” Her father had been careful to keep his opinion of Sherlock mostly neutral, he always said that you had to get angry at the disease or problem more than the person sometimes, but his disappointment and anger with him had shone through despite it. Tess had always been more vocal about it than any of them but Karen had resented this man for giving her father so much grief and not understanding what a wonderful friend he could have if he’d let him be.

“He’s not a bad man,” her father sighed. “At least I don’t think so. I used to think that I’d make him good, or we’d make him good, but that’s not looking to be in the cards.”

Just because her father can’t do it doesn’t mean that he never will be and she tells him that. It’s like one of the girls in her class, Jenny, who could not for the life of her understand fractions until the teacher from down the hall had helped her through it. Jenny had had tutors, extra help, and everything with the best people that Karen’s teacher had recommended. It just so happened that the music teacher had helped her.

“I think he’ll be a good man one day. It may be because of you and it may not but it will happen.” She doesn’t know what about that conversation had changed her mind about Sherlock Holmes but it had. Yes she had been eleven and her mind could change like the wind back then but she had been sure then. Surer than she’d been about anything else at that time anyway. 

Her father had agreed with her on both counts and it mostly hadn’t been to humour her.

The next time her father had a case she got out of school because Sherlock refused to work without her being there. They were looking for a girl Karen’s age who had run away from home and Sherlock said he wanted to see what a real, breathing, eleven and a half year old girl would do. Now she recognizes that he had needed her there about as much as he needed a doll to be tossed around a room, crawl out of windows and run across fields. He was trying to reward her in some way for something at the house. She still isn’t quite sure what that was. She has seen a few crime scenes since then, not many of course but sometimes she has to get by the police tape for whatever reason, but she holds this one close to heart and plans to tell her grandkids about it when she’s an old lady. They found the girl and Sherlock even said to her father that he couldn’t have done it without her. She suspects that he was lying, or at least exaggerating, but her father thinks he was being serious. Still does whenever the case is brought up. 

===================================================================================== 

The years went by and by the time she was thirteen her father’s step was lighter and his worry lines were less so. Sherlock had been off the drugs for awhile. He’d become a semi regular fixture at all hours of the night, which made Tess angry because Tess is a light sleeper and hates having to put extra make up on in the morning to cover the dark circles under her eyes. Karen started to see Sherlock as family then, at least as a particularly strange cousin or uncle or something, and when she voiced it aloud for the first time Tess told her that she really had no idea about family if she counted Sherlock as part of theirs.

They are a single parent family. Their one parent is a Detective Inspector for Scotland Yard. Their mother dropped them off with her aunt and uncle while their father was at work and said she’d be back to pick them up after a lunch date with her girl friends. She had never come home. No policeman every found her and no trace was ever uncovered. A year after her disappearance her father had received an envelope containing divorce papers and an official renunciation of her parental rights. No one has heard from her since. Normal wasn’t exactly anywhere near what described them.

Dad worried about Sherlock. He cared about Sherlock, he made sure he was healthy and safe (or at least he tried), and he did what he could to make sure he got himself on track with his life. He was living up on Montague Street at this time and it seemed that this recent attempt at getting clean was a real one. Dad hadn’t known how much she’d known then but she’d known that he’d tried six times and had had three stints in rehab. This last one, one he’d been thrown into by someone named Mycroft (Karen did not meet Sherlock’s brother until much later), seems to have solved everything.

One night when her Dad was asleep she took his dad’s phone and called up Sherlock’s number. She hadn’t known why she was doing this but she sent him the text anyway. **_this is karen lestrade. congrats and please dont relapse. my dad will never forgive you. i wont either._**

She didn’t know why she added that last bit. What does her opinion matter to a man like Sherlock Holmes? She may talk to him more than her sisters do whenever he’s at the house but she’s only seen him a handful of times over the past two years. In the end she is still just one of her father’s daughters and certainly not someone to be careful of disappointing.

The phone vibrated in her hand and she flipped the phone open slowly to read it. She slammed her hand over her mouth to hide her smile and stifle the delighted noises she made. 

_**The only thing that would make me go back is if I ever receive a text message from you again with such careless disregard to basic punctuation, though it seems you can handle a full stop well enough. You may rest easy in that I have no intention of disappointing your father or you in that way. SH**_

When she got back to her room her own phone was flashing with a new text message.

**_I hope you deleted those messages from your father’s mobile. I’m sure he would not be impressed that I’m conversing with his thirteen year old daughter without his supervision. I am a terrible influence on all of you I’m sure. SH_**

===================================================================================== 

Sherlock Holmes still drives her father up the wall but in a different way. Her father, Karen thinks, had hoped that Sherlock would mellow out without the drugs. Sherlock is still mad, brilliant, abrasive and uncaring. Or at least her Dad thinks he is most of the time. He still stands by the idea that Sherlock Holmes will one day be a good man and Karen agrees with him. She saw Sherlock less and less often through that school year, probably because Dad had more than had it with him appearing at the house unannounced looking for cases when he was bored or when he had nothing better to do. Her father put up with it because he feared him going back to the cocaine but he’d rather that he be home when Sherlock dropped by.

Sometimes Sherlock did drop by without her father being home but only did it when he knew it would just be her at home. Usually he just insulted whatever she’s watching on the telly and laughed at whatever science or math problem she wasn’t doing properly but she was fine with him being there. He was frustrating at the best of times then but mostly she remembers being sorry for him. He had no friends; just the work. “You should make a friend, Sherlock.” She told him one day. She’d just turned fourteen she remembers very badly wanting to be left alone to finish a project.

Sherlock had laughed and informed her that he didn’t have friends. “I’ve never had friends.” “I think my Dad’s your friend.” “Your Dad’s an idiot.” She chose not to rise to his bait and he went about his business ranting about whatever classified information that he really shouldn’t have been blabbing to a teenage girl. She pretended to not be interested but he kept going and she remembers hoping and praying that she could get through this course, get through school, get her degrees, and have her father’s job one day in spite of the madman chattering around her without need for a breath. 

“Everyone needs friends.”

“Everyone needs a mother, or so they say, and yet here you are and you get on fine.”

“I don’t know any different.”

“Neither do I and I exist just fine.”

Karen had several ways to counter that argument if what her father tells her and what she hears are true. What she really wanted to explain to Sherlock was that having friends is essential. It is possible to survive without her mother because of her father, because of her sisters, and because of her friends. If her father and her sisters vanished she would have her friends to support her. If she only had family she would be fine but something would be lost if all she had were Tess and Louise and her Dad and she didn’t have Jane and Krista and Meg. There were some parts of your family that were chosen and sometimes the presence or absence of those people decided everything. When she thought she had a way to explain that she found Sherlock gone. Her Dad had come home ten minutes later annoyed but not annoyed that Sherlock had been by again. 

“Does he have anyone?” she asked him then. 

“He has a meddling brother and a rather nice mother. No one he goes out to the cinema with on the weekend or anything like that. If Sherlock would ever go to a film.” Karen hadn’t bothered asking her father if he would ever go out with him to the pub or to a football game. Aside from Sherlock decidedly not being the type of bloke Karen could see at the pub or at footie she think that Dad almost considers him a child of his more than a friend.

Karen had spent some amount of time being sorry for Sherlock Holmes. What had been one more thing to add to the list. “I hope he finds a friend. He’s lonely.”

“He doesn’t know anything else and that’s probably a good thing. He doesn’t know he’s lonely.” It remains one of the most depressing things that has ever left her father’s mouth. “I’m not sure he’d know what to do with a friend if one every came his way.”

Six months later Sherlock Holmes met Dr. Watson and Sherlock stopped popping up at the house. Her father and her are both impressed and worried. Her father was worried for the doctor but Karen was worried that Sherlock would find a way to bollocks it up.

=====================================================================================

John Watson used to be in the army, which had fascinated Tess for so many creepy reasons. Tess had gone through three boyfriends in as many months that year and Karen remembers just wanting to vomit everywhere at the way she looked at Dr. Watson. Tess was seventeen years old and really ought to have know better. Louise never had been that bad at that age. Then again Louise had been nearly twenty and had yet to even kiss a boy. Dr. Watson politely ignored her but it looked like Sherlock was doing his absolute best to not egg her on. Weird for him. At least it had been then. The Sherlock she knew would be manipulating this situation for all it was worth. Then again the Sherlock she first knew would never have accepted a dinner invitation. Dad had been asking him over for dinner, a proper sit down dinner, ever since he’d cleaned up but Sherlock had always turned him down. Karen strongly suspected then, and knew for sure now, that Sherlock’s friend was the only reason that he had attended.

Dr. Watson doesn’t have kids, and he plans on never having any he says, but he deals very well with her. Louise seems to have always been a grown up in Karen’s head and there was no good way to deal with Tess when she was infatuated. Things are good between them now but then had just been a mess. He talked a lot with her and Karen did her best to be someone that he can talk to without feeling awkward about her age. She thinks she did a good job because at some point through that first dinner he had asked her to call him John.

Dad wa going around filling up everyone’s wine glass, Karen was delighted she got to have a little at dinner, but John put his hand over his quickly. Karen still remembers how fast that hand had flown from utensil to glass. “Only the one for me, thanks.”

“Oh come on,” Dad nudged. “A bit of red wine is good for you.”

“In moderation.”

“John’s parents were alcoholics,” Sherlock butted in. “His sister is also one and he holds the mistaken belief that just because his family are alcoholics means he is also doomed to become one.”

“High chance though!” Half of that was anger at speaking of his family dynamics and half of it was Sherlock speaking out of turn. Was there even a point with getting angry at Sherlock when he acted like that? He’d looked a little bit guilty then and he still does whenever John informs him that he’s being ‘not good’ but it’s really pointless to even say anything. John doesn’t bother anymore but he’d been new to the game then.

“Just because your family does something doesn’t mean you will too.” Karen found herself joining the conversation before she even though about it. “Sometimes if your family does something you work your best to not do the same thing.” She chanced a look at her father who nodded at her to go on, both to keep speaking and to mention what she wanted to. “Mum left us when I was a baby,” she began. “I don’t think that makes me any more likely to leave my family than the next person. It makes me more convinced to never leave, or at least be very careful about when and if I want one since it’s obvious that Mum didn’t want one.” She flashed a quick apology with her eyes to her Dad had nodded at her again. She had nothing left to say, however.

“You at least had your Dad,” John told her. “Both my parents were rubbish and my sister was no better.”

“But you had friends, yeah?”

John had made a vague gesture with one hand. “Mates, maybe. Not friends, really. Just sort of got by on that and on being on my own.” 

John couldn’t see Sherlock but Karen could. Karen isn’t sure if her father or her sisters saw but she does know that she hadn’t though it possible for Sherlock Holmes to look at someone quite like that. She could see and tell in a minute that Sherlock was sorry for John’s troubles, sorry about his life and not because he thought he could get something out of John for feeling that way. The hand closest to John twitched, she swears to it, and she remembered urging with all she was for Sherlock to clasp his shoulder or pat his arm or something. Sherlock didn’t and the look left Sherlock’s face as soon as he realised Karen was watching.

“I think you’ve got a friend now.”

Sherlock almost looked embarrassed and John almost blushed. Tess later grumbled about all the good ones being gay and Karen almost thrwws her down the stairs for being so blind. 

===================================================================================== 

On Karen’s sixteenth birthday the hotel that is the centre of her father’s current case blows up. She skips school and rushes home to the telly so she can sit, terrified in front of the BBC coverage to see if her father is alive. She frantically texts him, demanding that he be okay or he is going to be sorry, until he responds back that he’s okay. Then she remembers, as she sees her father move around the rubble hurriedly on the telly, that Sherlock and John were there today too. That question doesn’t get answered fast enough for her liking so she’s on the Tube and demanding to be let through to see her Dad on site. The younger, newer guy takes her right to him. There must be something wrong with him since he doesn’t offer her any sort of protection until Sally shows up and gets her off site before her father finds her. “Are Sherlock and John in there?”

“Yes.” She’s glad Sally isn’t lying to her but she wants to fall down and start crying when she hears it. “I’ll tell your father you want to know when they’re out but get home. It’s not safe here.”

She heads home to find her sisters at home as well. Each has received the text messages from their father saying that he’s fine but all of them get worried all over again when she mentions John and Sherlock. For four hours they sit in front of the telly waiting for a glimpse of anything. Of course they see nothing and Dad is the one who lets them know that they were both found and are in hospital together.

Louise and Tess go about their lives after that, knowing that there’s nothing more for them to do, but Karen heads over. She finds her father and John haunting a waiting room after pestering some of her father’s underlings to let her see them. She gives her father a hug and then gives one to John as well. “He’ll be okay,” she promises him. She doesn’t even know what wrong with him but she promises him. “He’ll be okay, he’s always okay.” John says nothing until he’s told that he can go see him. He asks Karen if she’d like to join him. She goes only when her father says it’s okay.

Sherlock is bloodied and bruised and hooked up to more machines than Karen could ever think of existing. John slowly explains to her what each one does and she relaxes when she realises they’re mostly monitors. All Sherlock needs to do is wake up and he’s okay. John plunks down in a chair and buries his face in his hands. He looks like he wants to say something to her or say something to Sherlock so she solves both problems herself.

She takes John hands and secures it in Sherlock’s. “He won’t leave you,” she promises. “He couldn’t do it to you.”

“He may not have a choice.”

“Yes he does.” There is always a choice. You fight or run. You stay or you go. There is always a choice one way or another. I’m just not going to give him any other option.” She stomps over to the other side of Sherlock’s bed, closing the door as she passes by and ignores John’s attempts to silence her. 

“Now you listen to me, Sherlock Holmes.” She’s on her knees, her fists are knotted in the bed clothes, and she is surprised she’s keeping her voice as calm as she is. “You only have one choice and that is to get back here. You open your eyes and I don’t care how much it hurts and how much you have to fight. Your place is here, with John, and you know it is. If you do not come back I will never forgive you. Dad will never forgive you and John, no matter what he says after I leave, will never forgive you. This is worse than the cocaine. Now move your arse and get fighting. You have twenty four hours and if you don’t wake up before then I will make you wish you had never been born.”

John is speechless as she walks by. She stops at his arm and squeezes it. It’s part to offer comfort and part to stop her from throwing something.

“You’ve never lost anyone have you? That you remember I mean?” John asks.

Karen shakes her head. The only person who has ever left her is her mother and she doesn’t remember that. She knows intellectually that her grandfather isn’t long for this world and her father is meant to die before her and her sisters but those are instances where there will be no choice. They will get old and they will go but she knows that neither of them will go without a fight. Sherlock is not very old, he’s younger than her dad certainly, and he has no right to leave her life without a word or a fight like her mother did.

That’s not to say that she expects Sherlock to stay because of her. He’ll stay for John and no one else but she will remind him of where his place is just in case he hit his head as hard as John fears and needs to be reminded. “You’ve lost a lot,” Karen acknowledges. “You’re not losing him too.” Not on my watch, she doesn’t say. She heads back and sends her father in.

The next day when she’s at school she gets two text messages. The first one almost makes her stand up and cheer right in the middle of chemistry.

**_Twenty two hours precisely, Miss Lestrade. Thank you for the extra motivation. Tell your father to bring you around next time he visits or I’m not helping him with the Lexington case. SH._**

The second one is much more amusing.

**_Can you yell at him like that the next time he needs to pay the rent? – John_**

=================================================================================== 

When Sherlock Holmes jumps off St. Bart’s hospital Karen says to whatever can hear her that she will never forgive him for leaving John and making him watch. Her position does not change when she’s told that he jumped to save John. “He’s ruined him again,” she informs her father. Her opinion wavers a little when he adds that he had saved three people that day and one was her father. She thanks him for that but still cannot forgive him for the whole thing. “There was another way,” she cries into her father’s arms. “There has to have been another way.”

Dad says that he doesn’t think so. “In a way I’m glad he did,” her Dad says quietly. “When I first met him he would have cheerfully let us all die so he could live. Now we know he was a good man in the end.”

“He didn’t need to die to prove that!” she snaps. 

Dad agrees with her but Sherlock had made his choice and there was nothing for it now. 

Sometime after everything has died down she escapes on her lunch to head up to the cemetery. She sits down in front of Sherlock’s grave and studies the tokens left behind. The nicotine patches are from her father but she’s not sure what the other weird objects around the marker mean or who they’re from. Something here must be from John but she can’t pick it out. No one could understand their friendship and Karen won’t be arrogant enough to claim she has any sort of special power into it. She’s seen two lonely men find something in each other that they never had before and now they’d lost it. Or one had lost it.

“You bastard,” she announces to the stone. “You utter bastard.” She kicks the stone and is surprised when a bolt of lightning doesn’t strike her down for her impertinence. “You left him. You left him and he will always remember it. He’ll never be the same and he will never come back from this. You knew that. You knew that and you jumped anyway. You...you...” she falls to her knees and sobs right there on the grave. Cries and cries and cries and cries into the Earth until she feels a hand on her shoulder and a hand on her cheek to make her look up. They aren’t her father’s hands. She starts to pull away until she sees that it’s Sherlock. She tries to run, tries to scream, but instead Sherlock hugs her tight. It’s to muffle her cries more than to offer comfort and that’s what convinces her before he speaks.

“I am a bastard,” he tells her. “I left him to save him because a John who hates me is better than a dead John. I don’t expect you to understand but you can’t tell him. Not until I’ve eliminated the people who want him dead and I come back. Understand that?”

She nods and he vanishes like he was never there. She is still furious, furious now that she knows something so important and now has to keep silent. Later she realises that Sherlock had only made himself appear to her to see her fury and know that her fury would keep her silent. She wants to see what John does to him when he comes back and she wants him to be alive when he comes back so John can kill him. 

She hopes in spite of her fury that John can forgive him. Having Sherlock be dead for real will be better than watching what remains of the men burn away into nothing.

===================================================================================== 

Karen is on the cusp of her eighteenth birthday when Sherlock Holmes returns to London. 

**_John won’t talk to me SH_**

**_Welcome back. You broke him and now you need to fix him_**. As much as she may understand Sherlock’s reasons the damage is done and she’s got to prep for uni. She’s moving to Wales to start school before trying to apply as a copper. It’s a generic psychology thing but it looks like something she’ll like. She doesn’t hear from Sherlock or John for awhile and, as her departure date looms, she finds herself asking her father how it’s all going.

“Alright,” he tells her. “They’re at crime scenes together but it’s not the same. It’ll take awhile for it to be the same.” The ‘if it ever is the same again’ hangs in the air despite neither of them willing to think it or breathe it.

She finds herself wondering if her mother came back today would she act the same way. She throws that image out her head violently. That was different. Friends were the family you chose and when they betrayed you it hurt more than when family did. At least Karen thought so. Has to think so simply based on what she knows and what she’s seen.

Watching a friend leap off a building is quite special though.

She thinks about the only time she’s ever done this and thinks about it long and hard before she does it again. She takes her Dad’s phone and highlights John’s number in his contacts list. She’s about to text him but instead selects call at the last moment.

“Hello?”

“Hi John, “ she whispers, suddenly awkward. “It’s Karen. Karen Lestrade.”

“What’s happened with your father?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. I...I just called to see how you were...with Sherlock.”

John would have every right to hang up on her right there and they both know it. He talks like he’s about to for a moment and then goes on. “It’ll get better. I know it will.”

“You know he did it to save you, right? To save Dad, too. He wouldn’t have done that to you if he had a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

Her own words. She bites her lip. “Sometimes there isn’t. Or both choices are just as awful. The other choice was to tell you and know you’d be killed. Dead John who likes him or alive John who hates him. Both are awful. What would you pick?” For the first time she thinks just might understand her mother. It doesn’t scare her quite as much as it should.

“It’s more than that.”

“Of course it it.” It has to be since if it were that simple then things would be fine between them. “I just wanted you to know that’s what he thought.” Don’t ask me how I know, don’t ask me how I know.

John doesn’t, or perhaps he already does. “I did tell him once that friends protect people,” he sighs. “It was the last thing I said to him when I left him.”

“He did do that.”

“He did it very well. So well that I really should punch him for it.”

Karen thinks of that text message and the one she sent back. She thinks back to the man she’d found in her house looking for a pen six years ago. “I think he’d let you. I think he’d let you do anything to him if it meant that you even sort of forgave him.”

Another long silence. “I’d better go, “John finally says. “I’ve got to catch my train home.” They say a quick goodbye and ring off.

============================================================================ 

Her father hugs her and she reaches for her bags when he releases her. Her sisters have already hugged her and she’s just about to step onto the escalator when she sees John and Sherlock rushing up to them. She can tell without either of them speaking that things are fine. John looks like a real person and not a shadow and Sherlock is beaming as much as he can beam. “You utter morons,” she informs them as she drops her bags and walks toward them. She reaches up and makes a show of trying to knock their heads together. “Talk to each other a bit more often when stuff like this comes up, yeah? I’m not gonna be able to do it for you from Wales!”

“It’s not happening again.” Sherlock’s voice leaves about as much room for argument as John’s glare does. “John wished to see you off and show you that...well...”

“That here we are,” John finishes. “And here we’ll stay.” Sherlock looks at John like he’s not quite sure about what he’s said and John bats him off. “Here we’ll stay.” He reiterates. Forcefully.

John gives her a hug and Sherlock gives her some cigarettes disguised in a handshake. She quickly shoves them in her luggage while her father is distracted with her sisters. “How did you...”

“If you listen to him you’ll miss your flight!” John cuts in before Sherlock can get a word out. “Now go on, off with you.”

She looks down on the five of them from the escalator. Greg Lestrade is proud as punch. Louise Lestrade smiles in the sort of pride only older sisters can feel while Tess looks ready to cry. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson look at her both wishing her well from very different facial expressions. Down below is her family, three of them by blood and two of them by choice. She waves back at them and all of them, even Sherlock, waves back.

She thinks her family is just as normal as anyone else’s. Hers is just that much more interesting.


End file.
